According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That’s a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months… It’s also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.
Data from Valve: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined
I bet the Deck has a lot to do with this.
It does, but as a result we can now set up Linux on other machines and play a huge range of games. This removes one of the main obstacles for many people with Linux.
Love the Deck. I actually finish games with retro or pixel art aesthics with the deck compared to my PC or consoles. The pick up and go aspect and the smaller screen helps me keep coming back to it instead of abandoning it.
The deck has a lot to do with it whether people are playing on it or not. It’s the thing that’s made them make the big push into supporting games on Linux, which applies to other distros than just the Steam one.
It also pushes developers to ensure their games run on Linux, even if it’s through Proton
You have to glad when they don’t implement their own crappy launcher nowadays. Looking at you Bioshock Remastered! (btw, you can skip it via the launch options)
I have not found a way to bypass Larian Studios launcher in launch options but you can make a shortcut to the exe directly.
You can skip it with the
--skip-launcherlaunch optionYeah that’s what I’m thinking. Great that Linux is getting more representation overall though. Wonder how anti-cheat implementations work nowadays, I remember them not being supported on Linux before, so games didn’t run.
Actually the common anti cheat solutions provided Linux support for a while, but the developers/publishers have been choosing not to enable it.
It was the reason I moved to Linux. Though with another arch based distro and not the deck